Jacques Demy's Une chambre en ville | A Room in Town (1982)

Set in 1955 in the middle of a strike in Nantes, Une chambre en ville is nevertheless not a political film. But it is entirely narrated in music, as of course were Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. The difference, though, is that whereas the two former movies were relatively light in tone (Les Parapluies perhaps particularly sentimental), this film is bleak.

François Guilbaud (Richard Berry) is a striking worker who has hired a room in the home of Mme Langlois (Danielle Darrieux), the widow of a colonel she loved, and who has been ruined by her wayward son. The room is in the centre of the town, in the Rue du Roi-Albert near the cathedral and the préfecture: the main battleground between police and strikers.

François's girlfriend is Violette (Fabienne Guyon), who has discovered that she's pregnant by him and wants to marry him. But then François meets Édith Leroyer (Dominique Sanda), who's unhappily married to the brutish and impotent Edmond (Michel Piccoli), and they are both madly in love at first sight: Violette and Edmond suddenly become so much psychic history. Plus, the sexually frustrated Édith is – would you believe it? – Mme Langlois's daughter.

But then the fight between cops and strikers is played out on the streets below Mme Langlois's window, François is wounded and taken into her place, and dies: unable to live without him, Édith shoots herself dead and lies down at François's side. That's no singing matter.